Super Epic Crazy with Adam Wathan

Ian

Hello?

Aaron

Hello, Ian. We have, we have an interloper on the call today. Do you wanna go ahead and introduce this person that people probably don't know?

Ian

They they probably never heard of this guy. We're gonna give him a little attention. Adam Wathan, Tailwind CSS, our first time, reguest. Mhmm.

Adam

That's true.

Ian

First time having somebody on twice here, so that's very exciting. Yeah. I know. We have, like, kinda I feel like 2 main topics. I don't know.

You guys can correct me, but I feel like I wanna talk about Adam's hiring. He's he's out there looking to hire a couple people, and I me and him can commiserate on some things, I think, at the very least. And then, and then we wanna talk about, I think, some kind of he wanted to pick your brain a bit on getting some content ideas and video and a little free consulting, a little share What the heck? Quid pro quo. A little I'll be a guest if you give me some video tips.

So You're right. Do a little

Aaron

I will allow it.

Adam

I don't want any video tips. I thought we were gonna talk about Varen's video business.

Ian

No. We can do

Aaron

that too. Do that. Let's do that.

Ian

Great area also.

Aaron

I can't I can't be giving it away for free. I got no money, Ian. So yeah.

Ian

Oh, I wanna talk about this because I do wanna have this tailwind video tip idea because I still feel like there's so much untapped potential there. I feel like you guys have done some video stuff, but I don't know. I thought there's more to

Aaron

be done. Mhmm.

Ian

But Well, I

Adam

have a lot of a lot of conversation opportunity here

Ian

for sure. We're already at, like, a 2 hour podcast right So, alright. Why don't we start with jump right in with just hiring? So maybe give us a quick overview of what you're hiring and why you're hiring.

Adam

With this, but I will

Ian

Come on. We got it. Dive into it.

Adam

Yeah. So, yeah, we're looking to hire 2 people right now. It's something I've been trying. It's something I've been, like, that's been on my plate for a year, probably.

Ian

Just trying to figure out like, forever ago. You were, like, I'm gonna hire

Adam

people. You know, do I want this role or this role, or do they need to have management skills? Do they not need to have management skills? Like, a lot a lot Yeah. To get enough confidence to finally, like, post something that you feel, like, really describes what you want.

I don't think people who have never run a company before have any appreciation for, like, the amount of stress and decision making difficulty that goes into just, like, deciding to hire someone to do something and knowing if it's even the right thing to have someone do.

Ian

Well, it's and

Aaron

we don't

Adam

have to tag a

Ian

There's a lot of commitment in there of, like, it's it's a lot of commitment on the businesses side. It's like if you lock in the wrong person for the wrong job, that's, like, a whole endeavor to undo that decision later. So yeah. Mhmm.

Adam

And just even identifying, like, I don't know. It's easy to make a mistake of, like, hiring people to do, like, the thing your company does, and then really that just means you get to do less of it now. You know? Right. So if, like, if I hire more programmers, that's more programming for me to delegate and less programming for me to do.

You know? Right. And that's, like, not that fun. So you have to be really careful to make sure that you're, like, identifying, like, these are things that, like, would really make my life better if I could, like, get them off my plate. Yeah.

So we're hiring for 2 roles. We're hiring for, like, you know, what I ended up calling, like, a staff software engineer role, which is someone to work on, like, Tailwind CSS itself and headless UI and all the stuff around that. So, like, our Versus code extension, the Prettier plug in. And, basically, their job would be, like, a full time, like, super senior open source maintainer. So a lot of, like Mhmm.

You know, trying to make sure everything is working and it's fast and is easy to maintain and that people's issues are getting fixed and that pull requests are getting managed properly and fixing things in other libraries we depend on when they break or trying to, like, campaign to get new features added to other libraries that we need to be able to do the things that we need to do. So that's kind of, like, the first role that we're hiring for, and then we're also hiring a design engineer. So someone who is, like, very much a super strong UI engineer but with design skills too. Not necessarily, like, pro super epic crazy designer design skills, but, like, if they were as good of a designer as me at a minimum, that would be sufficient. Someone who can contribute in the design process.

You know? Like, me and Steve have had so much success working together on, like, designing color palettes or fine tuning animations or whatever. And a lot of that is, like works because I at least have, like, taste and care about it. Right.

Ian

But I

Adam

can't, like, sit there in Figma and make something from scratch like Steve can and make it look great.

Aaron

You know what I mean? Right.

Adam

So that person would be working on, like, basically building out any web stuff that we need. So we're, like, doing tailwind 4. We're gonna redesign that whole site and build it out with new interactive fits and animations and whatever. If we just did, like, a headless ui.com redesign, that's not shipped yet. They would have worked on that.

Nice. You know, building new components and templates and stuff, for for Tailwind UI. And then also, like, I'm hoping to find someone who's got a bit of a knack for noticing interesting things in the work they're doing and, like, breaking it down and sharing it online as, like, tidbits of educational content to just kind of the the way that me and Steve have historically done marketing Right. At the company. You know?

So if you build some cool thing for something that we're working on and you make a Twitter thread about it that people can benefit from, you know, that's great. Because we don't really do marketing marketing. We just kinda try to find things to pull out of the actual work. You know?

Ian

Right.

Adam

So to have more people around that, like, are kinda have a knack for, like, noticing cool things to share would would be helpful too. Yeah. So we posted those last week. Oh, they're open until April 3rd, I think. And, yeah, hopefully, we can find some good people.

Ian

I mean, I feel like those are landed on the right roles there, like, things that you guys do, but, like, other people could take over those bits and help with those bits. And you're not gonna totally lose the magic of what you guys do at the highest level. Also not, you won't be totally bored because they're doing everything you do and things like that. Yeah. So yeah.

Yeah.

Adam

For sure. Yeah. I'm I'm optimistic that it'll be it'll be the right team makeup. It's a little bit different from, like like, we had 2 people leave in the summer for different roles at other companies, and these roles don't really, like, one to one replace those. They're kinda, like, slightly modified versions of of those.

Kinda just learning from, like, where I think things could have gone better. So, yeah, we'll see.

Aaron

Yeah. So that was my question. Are these back filling needs that you already have or is this, like, you're growing a little?

Adam

A little bit. So, like, we don't really have, like, someone who's, like, just fully focused on building front end stuff right now. Like, me and Jonathan do most of that right now, whereas we had someone doing that before. And we've always thought it would be good to have someone just really focused on that stuff who, can go through, like, our documentation when there's, like, nothing on the calendar scheduled that's, like, a front end project and just be like, oh, this demo is kinda ugly. I'm gonna make this one better or make this one better and just polish, polish, polish all the time.

And then, yeah, the other role, again, doesn't really replace, like, a role we had before. But we had someone on the team before who was doing, like, a bit of a mix of front end stuff and, like, working on tooling and and back end stuff. So kinda, like, splitting that up a bit now. So there's just someone just focused on UI stuff and then someone focused on the back end stuff. The back end stuff, there's just so much work to do, that we could just straight up use another person, you know, no matter what.

So yeah. Like, because we got tail end, headless UI. We got, like, a 2 point o version of that coming out. We still have to, like, port all that over to Vue. Like, I consider that to be, like, in our space, that's, like, back end work.

You know what I mean? Yeah.

Ian

That's fine. That's fine. Saying that. I was like, yeah. No.

That's, like, I think he needs, like, the JavaScript. Yeah.

Adam

It's like the bat the our whole company is, like, the back end of the front end. You know, like, that's, like, what we do. And then there's, like, the commercial side is sort of, like, the true front end stuff. Yeah.

Aaron

So supposed to be working on Catalyst?

Adam

Yes. Both of them in a sense. So the staff engineer role would be doing a lot of work on headless UI, which is all motivated by work on things like catalyst. So that's kinda why we are doing headless UI 2.0 because we're building catalyst and realizing there's, oh, we need this.

Aaron

We need this.

Adam

We need to change this.

Ian

We need

Adam

to change this. So then Robin would be in there fixing things to have this UI. And, yeah, so the design engineer would be doing a lot of work on the actual catalyst components, new templates, new whatever. And, yeah, then the software engineer person is gonna be working on stuff like Devos UI, tone and CSS, stuff like that. So So since oh,

Aaron

I was gonna say, since you're actively hiring, I'll kick this one over to Ian. Ian, do you wanna complain about hiring?

Ian

Well, I thought since Adam brought this up on Twitter, I should at least discuss it.

Aaron

Too, but I'll try to.

Ian

That's good point. And I know this has been kind of banter on Twitter, so I'm sure a good chunk of our audience has seen us talking about it and now I'm talking about it. But I mean, there is this it's just amazing. I know, Aaron, you brought this up too. Like, just this extra effort.

If you just do any extra effort when you're applying for a job, you just stand out so much more than you could possibly imagine. Like, you just think, oh, man. There's, like, hundreds of people applying to Tailwind. Like, I'm not gonna have any shot. Meanwhile, like if you put in like an hour of effort, you're already in probably the top 10 to 15 people out of.

Higher than out

Adam

of top 1%. Right.

Ian

Right. Yeah. Top 1%. Yeah. So it's so incredible, like, what an hour of effort could do for this really I mean, this is an excellent job.

It's very well paying. It's you're working on cool stuff with cool people in a small

Aaron

environment. You buy some cool Yeah. Some cool stuff, man.

Ian

Yeah. Like, this is a dream job type scenario, and it's like 98 percent of the people are just mailing it in. And, yeah. So so maybe talk a little bit about that.

Aaron

Yeah. I think your tweet said something like 90% of people don't even follow the instructions.

Ian

So we're not,

Adam

like Yeah. That's bars are so low. To this Yep. Still to this point. Now that's a little skewed because of the fact that I think, like, we have a big audience, so we're gonna get even more of those, like, low quality, kinda just, like, spamming the form application.

Ian

There's a lot of automated ish type things out there and things now. Yeah.

Adam

Yeah. Shocking number of people in, like, the cover letter field write NA, and, like, they've decided that's not applicable to them. They don't need to

Ian

do that

Adam

to get a job.

Ian

You know

Aaron

what I mean?

Adam

Really shocking amount of people.

Ian

Wow. And just people, yeah, who are like, oh, I'll just fire my resume in there, and that'll be enough. And it's like, oh, if you just do even, like, write a nice cover letter.

Adam

Exactly. Like, just like thing. You tell me if this is true for you too. But for me, hiring is terrifying. It's, like, such a high risk thing.

You know? Yep. Do you hire someone and it doesn't work out? Unless you're, like, a sociopath, like, you have now been put in, like, the worst situation imaginable because you have to, like, mess up someone's life. You know what I mean?

Then, like, put them in,

Ian

like, a random.

Adam

Well, like, not, like, ruin their life.

Aaron

From the other side. Yeah.

Ian

You

Adam

really great. Really have to throw a wrench in their gears. You know what I mean? And put them under into a really stressful position if you have to let someone go because, like, it you made the wrong hire or something. So it's, like, really Yep.

A really high consequence, like, scary decision to make. So your job as an applicant, at least when you're applying here, is to, like, make me like, reduce that risk. You know what I mean? Like, what can you do to just make it seem like a safe bet? You know?

Right. Yeah. Most people just don't do anything to to to do that at all.

Ian

I do feel like people are so I I guess to me, what I've always taken from it, it kind of is that, like, people don't really understand the difference between hiring between applying to, like, a bootstrap type company or even a small VC type company, and like just IBM and Microsoft and Google and whatever. Right. And so like the things you have to do for those big mono, you know, megalith type corporations, like, yeah, like a zillion people are applying. You're going through like 2 keyword checks before a human even sees your thing. Fine.

Like, so, okay. You have to do that stuff. And maybe nobody cares about your cover letter, because like once you get past a certain automated check, you get an actual human to read it more or whatever. Who knows? And maybe, maybe at least I don't even know if this is true, but maybe you feel like if I build a custom website to apply at Microsoft, nobody's gonna see that it's not worth the time.

Adam

Yeah. Their machines can't parse that.

Ian

And, we can't tell you or whatever. Yeah. You do the extra effort or whatever. So you put, put the extra effort into maybe optimizing your resume and you don't do the other stuff. But at like a small company, it's like totally the reverse.

It's like, I'm only looking for the extra effort. Like I'm only looking for, like, you cared enough to look into what this company is, what I do, what we're actually asking you for, like all that stuff. And I'm not, my automated checks are like, you didn't do any extra effort trash, not even looking at your resume, not even looking at anything else. Like, you're not, it's like the reverse. Like I'm not gonna get because you have the right keywords.

I'm not gonna automatically look at your thing. I'm gonna automatically not look at your thing because you didn't need the extra effort. Like I do know, like there's a lot of that where like, people are just so used to like, well, I'm looking for a job. I'm just like, out there sending resumes, and they just lump you in with that, and that's, like, totally the wrong approach.

Adam

Yeah. It it it's interesting too because, like, I can sort of empathize because I can remember before I ever had to hire anyone. I you just don't have any, like, you don't have the right intuition for, like, what

Ian

Yeah.

Adam

Someone's looking for. And now I feel like I could get any job in the world because, like, I know I can, like

Ian

I know what to say and do.

Adam

I know exactly what to say. You know what I mean?

Ian

Yep. Yep.

Aaron

Yeah. Yeah. I I feel like you don't even have to have experience on the other side. Like, you just have to you just have to be, like, a little bit clever and empathetic and think like, I wonder what you have to wonder what's going on over there. Like, how can I how can I make it easier for this person to pick me?

It's like, that's that's kind of the whole game, isn't it? Yeah.

Ian

I mean, this is a thing that software developers are not traditionally very good at. Right? And like, one of the things I've always hired for in developers is like people who are more entrepreneurial and like, this is like a re big reason why is because like, yeah, like they tend to be more like they have empathy of like the, they understand the business aspect, even if they just have like sold one little thing or not that they've run a big company. Right? They've sold one little thing or they're interested in selling stuff and they're thinking that way and they're thinking about marketing and sales.

And even if it's on, like, a more basic level, like, that's actually a huge advantage. So definitely be doing those kind of things. This is where, like, side projects are really good for people because I think it you grow from those things, and it makes you more hireable because it's just like, yeah, when you just come out from the pure dev perspective without any of the other stuff, it's just like, well, I'll just put my experience on this PDF, and then they'll hire me because I'm good at the thing that they're doing. But really, if you really read, like, these job descriptions, Adam has, for example, it's like, no, there's actually a lot more there than just like, can you code? Like there's a lot of people who can code, but can you understand what the customers actually want?

And can you help us deliver those things? And can you do it in a way that's packaged that we want in the style we wanna package things in and things like that? And so there's actually a lot there that's not code per se, or at least not purely code. So

Aaron

You You know, if you wanna know the the most developer response ever to sing to to this to this conversation, the most developer response ever is, I shouldn't have to put in extra effort. And if you're not compensate if you're not compensating me for my time of putting in this extra effort, I'm not going to do it.

Adam

It's like, alright. The the flip side of that is, you know That's

Aaron

great for me.

Adam

You know how much my time gets wasted? Like, really, how much? Like disproportionate about compared to anyone who applies. I promise to

Ian

you that.

Adam

But I

Ian

do think it's an interesting time too because you have, like, the last couple years where, like, you know, from the getting hired perspective was shooting fish in a barrel. It's like, yeah, I have like 10 job offers. Like everybody's competing over me and throwing money at me and like all that kind of stuff. And now it's, you know, I don't think it's quite as doom and gloom as people sometimes pay it out to be, but I do think it's shifted a little bit from the, just like everybody who's ever done anything can get hired for a ridiculous amount of money to like, ah, there's a little more competition. You might have to like prove yourself a little more.

You might sell yourself a little more.

Aaron

Might have to follow the instructions on the

Ian

application. Instructions.

Adam

Like, sure.

Ian

At least the most basic level of now.

Aaron

Yeah. I'm having to follow instructions. That's bad news.

Ian

Yep. Yep. Exactly. Yeah. So I do think some of that is in there too.

Adam

Yeah. We'll see. I mean,

Ian

yeah. Some people, though? It sounds like maybe you got a couple a couple potentials.

Adam

A couple. Let's yeah. There's a there's a few in there that have submitted the awful application so far, so that's good. I expect they'll get better over time. I'm sure the beginning is when the worst ones will come in because those are gonna be the lowest effort.

Aaron

Mhmm.

Adam

Towards the end, you know, I think the best ones will come in, like, right near the end when people are finally, like, you know, I gotta submit this. I can't polish it forever or whatever.

Ian

Right.

Adam

It sounds like I I don't there's no expectations on people to, like, build these, like, crazy ambitious things, but you wanna just, like, do your best effort to, like, sell yourself. You know what I mean? It just has to be a piece of writing. It doesn't have to be

Ian

beyond that. You know what

Adam

I mean? Yeah. But just, like, I think I think the best people are probably gonna wanna write something, sleep on it, read it, sleep on it, read it. You know what I mean? And just, like, really feel like I feel really good about this thing that I'm sending through.

Yep. I know you have to do, like, really over the top things that I think is worth pointing out. Like, that's not necessarily, like, the thing. Like, if you build, like, some crazy interactive game as a resume or something, you know, we've had people, like, submit stuff like that. And that doesn't necessarily, like, work.

You know what I mean? Like, just because, like, you'd, like, wrote a lot of code, it does and it took you a lot of time. It's not the same as just, like, really trying to derisk you as, like, an applicant and really thinking about, like, what is being looked for. You know? You can spend a lot less time than that, I guess, is my point.

As long as you just, like, you know, speak to what's outlined in the application, why you'd be a good fit for that, what you've done in the past that's relevant, point to any evidence that you're gonna succeed in the role. You know? Yep. That's really the the key for sure. So

Ian

And I feel like you guys are a a fairly conservative company. And, like, so you're not necessarily looking for somebody who's, like, a maniac and it's like, look at I'm I'm way out there and I'm like creating insane stuff to get this job. It's like, yeah, you're just looking for somebody who's like reliable, who's gonna take the time,

Adam

you know, put in the effort.

Ian

Yeah. Like solid, like, you know, you, you took the time and effort. You didn't go crazy, but like, yes, you didn't spend 50 hours building a game out of tailwind, but you did spend 3 hours, like over 3 or 4 days, maybe like writing something, thinking about it, going back over it, asking 5 people to look at it.

Adam

In the past. Here's, like, a request I opened to this project where I spend a lot of time convincing them that it was a good thing to add. You know, like, that those sorts of things are the sorts of things that are gonna really help me feel like, oh, yeah. Like, this person looks like they know what they're doing. You know?

Ian

Yep. Yep. So Yeah. Cool.

Adam

We'll see.

Ian

Alright. No. I think, I think you'll get there. Are you willing to not hire someone if you don't find the right person? Sometimes people get in that mode.

Aaron

Yeah.

Ian

You know? Like, I'm hiring somebody and I'm just gonna, like, I'm not gonna do this again. You know?

Adam

Yeah. I hope we find the right people. Like, I I'd be really disappointed if we didn't, but we don't need to. You know? Like, there's

Ian

Yeah.

Adam

There's probably gonna be, like, ROI on these roles, but, it's just,

Ian

like, me taking a pay cut to hopefully, like, have a more fun work environment. You know what I

Adam

mean? Yeah.

Ian

This is a whole

Aaron

other aspect of the boost up company.

Ian

Right? Like, this is, like, Mike, the the hiring manager at Microsoft is not like, this is my personal money and, all that whole angle on things. Whereas like, yeah, in our companies, it's like, oh, like, well, now I'm gonna have 275,000 less dollars. Like, hopefully, they're gonna make that back, but there's a chance they're not gonna exactly make it back either. At least not, like, a clear way.

It might not be directly one to 1. Like, oh, I completely see this hire made me $600,000. Like, it's not probably gonna be quite like that. So

Adam

No. So it's yeah. Yeah. It's it's it's different, man. It's it's people don't think about it that way.

I don't think, this is, like, someone's money. It's not, like, magic company money.

Aaron

You know what I mean? Right.

Ian

Right. I where you just have, like, hey. I have a budget, and not only is the magic company money, but if I don't spend this money, I will lose it. They will be like, oh, you had a $1,000,000 to hire 3 people and you only spent 600,000, like next year, you don't, then you get 600,000 next year. You don't get a 1,000,000 next year.

Yeah. So, or you have to fight for that million again or whatever. Yeah. Like, so yeah, it's very, very different there. You're actively trying to spend your budget most of the time, to, to justify it essentially.

So, yeah. Very interesting. Alright. For me, break in here very quickly. We're gonna do a quick ad for our friends over at Lara Casts.

Jeffrey Way, so gracious to sponsor us. Let me bring him up so I can do that. So I have to make this part a little more streamlined. We gotta work on this part for the video. But, anyway, Laracast, you know, friends of the show.

I know Adam, I'm sure has been involved in Laracast at different points, but just invaluable resource to the Laravel community and web development community. So check out Lara cast.com. Everything about Laravel, they got the new Laravel 11 course going right now, which is really awesome. I've, started poking in on that and learning things myself in there. So, check that out.

It's only $19 a month. They still have a lifetime deal. I think it's 3.99 for life. As we've talked about before, both Aaron and I are lifetime, members. So definitely check that out.

It's the easiest, sort of buy in the whole, community, I would say. It's just a no brainer. It's a write off. And It's

Aaron

a write off.

Ian

So check out Laracast. Thank you, Laracast and the crew over there for sponsoring the show. Truly appreciate it.

Aaron

And when you go sign up for Laracast, go watch my course first. So Jeffrey thinks, oh, wow. Aaron's course must be really good. So

Ian

Yes. Aaron's got a course on there. So if you haven't seen that, definitely do that. And it's was that what's the topic again? Is it Eloquent?

Aaron

No. Sidecar. The serverless functions. Yeah.

Ian

Yep. Yep. So check that out. And, thanks for Larocast. All right.

So where do we wanna go next here, guys?

Adam

I wanna talk about Aaron's business.

Aaron

Tell me, Adam.

Adam

Let's do it.

Ian

Do I

Adam

have anything on you? I just wanna What's your just

Ian

wanna What's your hot tea?

Adam

I think we need to figure out we need to figure out a plan, a really great plan. I love it. You know?

Ian

I like this. I love a good time.

Adam

So after

Aaron

after I told you, you were like, I wanna come on the pod. So you're driving.

Adam

You you tell me, where

Aaron

are we going?

Adam

So we we chatted about some things. You know, you made your big announcement. I think, I just wanna keep riffing on it because, like, we had you were kinda cut off because we had to Mhmm. You had to talk to one of your 60,000 potential employers.

Aaron

And, You had to go see Seinfeld, so it it, like That's true. To be fair, it went both you know, both ways. Yeah.

Adam

Why my wife I've let the dog in. I gotta live live with the dog. Alright. That's fine. As long as the dog stays quiet.

Yeah. So we went to see Seinfeld then Dogs

Ian

of the pod.

Adam

I got to, I got to sit 15 feet away from Jerry Seinfeld while he had dinner for, like, an hour and a half at a dead empty restaurant in the corner of the, casino. It was, incredible.

Ian

Friendship. You were, like, live messaging us. Seinfeld's cross. There he is. He's he's his appetizers arrived.

Oh, it was crazy. It was it was awesome.

Adam

Here's what happened. We got to the casino, Fallsview Casino, Niagara Falls. Me and Steve got there to check-in. Walk up to the counter to check-in, and as we walk up to the counter, these 3 guys come out of the elevator and, like, walk past us. And in the corner of my eye, I'm, like, is that Jerry Seinfeld?

Ian

But I

Adam

I just thought, what are the odds? You know? Like, they look different than they do on TV in 1991. You know what

Ian

I mean? Like Right. He looks a lot older. It's like

Adam

there's some recognizable features or whatever. You don't wanna stare. He's wearing a ball cap. He's got, like, you know, just, like, some New Balance sneakers on or or whatever.

Aaron

That giveaway.

Adam

And I and I don't know, like, what how he dresses, but I just kinda I saw these shoes, and I just kinda thought I kinda doubt it's him for some reason. Like, these shoes, like, for a billionaire dude, like, I think he's worth almost $1,000,000,000.

Ian

That is good.

Adam

It didn't look like billionaire shoes to me. You know? So I thought that's probably not him. That's literally what I thought. We do our check-in.

They tell us our rooms aren't gonna be ready for a bit. So me and Steve are like, let's go grab a beer at this, like, bar right across from, like, the check-in desk. So we go in there, we go and walk to our table. Steve's, like, let's go sit over by the front of these tables there, and I was, like, why don't we get a booth? Why don't we get a booth?

And he's, like, okay. Okay. I'll I'll get a booth. I could tell he didn't really wanna get a booth, but

Ian

his

Adam

one said Bob. Yeah. Played along. Now in retrospect, he's really grateful we got this booth because this booth was 2 tables away from these gentlemen in this dark corner.

Aaron

Are you listening? You should be grateful we got the booth. Yeah.

Adam

And, we sat down, and I said to Steve, because I saw some people at the stable, and these are the same people that walked past me, when we were checking in. I sit down and I'm, Steve, is that fucking Jerry Sandoval behind us? And Steve looks over there, and he's like, it is. And then that was it. Me and Steve were excited to just sit drink drink a couple beers, chat business for an hour and a half.

We could talk about nothing

Ian

for

Adam

an hour and a half. Right. We couldn't speak. Our brains didn't function. We were just totally starstruck living in this insane moment where he's behind me.

And all I hear this whole time, I'm trying to like drink a beer with Steve is Jerry Seinfeld voice talking over my shoulder because they're not back there even being quiet. They're just, like, chitchatting. He's talking about some shoot he was doing in LA last week, whatever. And it's just Jerry Seinfeld's voice,

Ian

you know, like, most

Adam

iconic voice in my entire life over my shoulder the whole time. Just couldn't even yeah. It was a it was a pretty insane

Ian

It's amazing.

Adam

Thing. Did not Yeah. That's make eye contact.

Aaron

Did not incredible.

Adam

Speak to him. I'm sure he would have hated it. So

Aaron

He would have hated

Ian

it. But,

Adam

freaking hated it. We did sneak a couple horrible blurry photos that will act as evidence.

Aaron

Yep. Yep.

Ian

We saw them. We can make them out. Yeah. Yep.

Adam

It was, it was quite that's probably, like, the most famous person I'll ever be, nearby for that period of time ever.

Aaron

For sure.

Ian

For that long, probably. Yeah. I do like, before last year, when we were in Miami, we walked into an elevator. Were you there for that? We walked into the elevator with mister mister Beast there for that.

Adam

Right? We saw mister Beast a couple days later on

Ian

the show.

Adam

And then we saw Jamie Fox too when we were there.

Ian

Yeah. I miss Jamie Fox.

Adam

You miss Jamie Fox. That was, like, the last I think I was the last person to see him before he was hospitalized. You know?

Ian

Yeah. It was right before he was hospitalized. What did you do, Adam?

Aaron

Yeah. Seriously.

Adam

He looked good when I saw him.

Ian

He looked? Yeah. I think he looked good.

Aaron

About utility CSS, and that was too much. Yeah.

Adam

That was too much. Was mine. Anyways

Aaron

Uh-huh. Anyways. Uh-huh.

Adam

Anyways, Seinfeld was awesome.

Aaron

Sounds awesome.

Adam

So Aaron's business. Yeah. We were chatting and Yeah. We were chatting about, like, you had some course ideas and stuff like that. That that's some of the things that I'm really curious to, like, push you on a little bit.

And I'm curious to get you in state.

Ian

I could

Adam

be totally wrong on this. And I'm curious and I wanted to do it on the podcast because, like, I want it to be out there so that people can tell me I'm wrong if I'm wrong. Okay.

Ian

You know?

Adam

But when we talked about it, you were talking about building this brand around, like, database education.

Aaron

Mhmm.

Adam

On the surface sounds to me like a reasonable idea. But I really worry that teaching people like MySQL, teaching people Postgres, whatever is like teaching people Excel. And that's like, people wanna learn it. They wanna Google it. They wanna find the answers to their problems.

But I don't know if, like, anyone's thrown out the take my money gift. You know?

Ian

K. Like,

Adam

I don't think I can sell an Excel course. Understand. No matter despite the fact that people need to use it every day and run into problems with it every single day. I think, like, the key for me in the past with selling courses at least has been, like, there has to be, like, sex appeal to it. You know what I mean?

There has to be, like, something that people are

Aaron

Which is inherent with databases. So we're good there.

Adam

Well, that's what I'm worried about. Not the sexier than I did in this. So I'm just trying to I just think it'd be good for us to chat about this and figure out what is the exciting version

Aaron

Mhmm. Of

Adam

teaching someone this stuff because it's useful stuff. It's important stuff. It's It's gonna make their apps better. But, like, test driven Laravel was, like, perfect for me because it was, like, this thing everyone's searching for, everyone's desperate to unlock the secrets of how do I write my apps test first, you know, like, that has that enigmatic piece to it, this thing people want to crack. But I also had the right balance of being this like, fairly evergreen, like, Google thing that people are looking for.

Because I know that is, like, an element of the appeal of doing, like, a Postgres course. Like, people are gonna wanna learn Postgres forever, but they might not wanna learn how to use this, like, flavor of the week Laravel package forever.

Aaron

You know what I mean? JavaScript package forever.

Ian

Sure.

Aaron

Like, I I hesitate to even wanna do the JavaScript ORMs because they change so much. So Sure.

Adam

Yep. I think that's valid. So the sweet spot definitely is trying to find something that's both because I think Mhmm. It's easy to find things that are 1 or the other. And typically, the really sexy ones are gonna be sort of short term focused, I think, and the less sexy ones are gonna be more long term, but maybe just not I don't know.

Again, I'm thinking about the Excel situation. I think people want the information. I don't I'm sure there's people out there making shitloads of money on Excel. Isn't there, like,

Aaron

that Miss Excel there.

Ian

Right? Right?

Adam

What does she sell? What is, like, her

Aaron

courses? I mean, on how to use Excel, and she's making, you know, she's the she's the Seinfeld of the world, though. So maybe a lot of I think there's another guy called Cam Free who does Google Sheets. But, yeah, she makes several $1,000,000 a year on her Excel content.

Adam

So this is what I mean. Like, I could be totally wrong. I think Excel is awesome, to be clear.

Aaron

22. Excel is awesome.

Ian

There is a I mean, yeah. Go ahead. You go ahead.

Aaron

Well, yeah. Let me let me do the counter, and then we can so here's my thought on it. So I do think, yeah, you're correct. I want to do like a database brand and have my SQL Postgres SQLite, all of the those courses under kind of that brand, as a part of the stuff that Steve and I are doing together. So this isn't like a separate thing.

This is

Ian

part

Aaron

of the plan from the beginning. The sexy thing is interesting. I agree that this doesn't really have too much sex appeal. I think what it does have though, is it is basically the gonna be the only one. Right?

So if you do something on, anything TypeScript or anything like remix or any react, anything like that. The the market is very, very crowded for those things. And even, you know, when done super well, you know, Kent c Dodds and Matt Pocock are both making 1,000,000 of dollars on their courses, but they're, like, you know, top of the top. I think what is exciting to me is the dearth of good middle educational content for databases. There's, like, DBA content, and then there's, like, I don't wanna know anything about a database at all.

I just wanna use your, you know, your API. And then there's that huge meaty middle of, I don't actually need to know how to host a database and keep it alive, but I would like to know how to make it work better. And I think that's what is missing, and that's why the course I did for, the company who shall not be named did so well because there was just like, this is the only accessible content.

Adam

Did it do well? Like, how much money did they make from it?

Aaron

I wouldn't be able to say if

Ian

Well, even that if I knew

Adam

that Was it a little bit irrelevant?

Aaron

It was free. It was

Ian

free.

Adam

So that's what I mean.

Ian

That's the thing.

Adam

That's the problem. Excel content can be free and get a lot of traffic, but I don't know that people were how well would it would it have done as a commercial thing? I think that's, like, my fear. There's definitely, like, a huge. There's definitely topics that, like, people will consume ravenously for free, but not pay for.

You know? That's, like Yeah. Yeah. That's my concern.

Aaron

The I okay. So one, I think the only piece of evidence I have that people might or would pay for it is before I joined Planet scale, I was hyping the course and writing articles. And it was like, Hey, it's it's coming. I'm gonna do this thing like, and I got maybe 800 to a 1000 people to sign up for, like, the early mailing list for this course that I told them would be paid. And so that's, you know, not money in the bank, but that's at least that's at least pretty good if I can get a 800 to a 1000 people on a list for a paid course before there's any content, that feels Yeah.

Close.

Adam

So in my head, I'm trying to think, like, there are, like, more exciting ways to spin these things. Right? So, like, you know, Jonathan Renning did this, like, eloquent performance pattern scores. That's basically teaching people database features. You know?

But that's like I'm excited to learn eloquent performance patterns. You know? Like, that's it's a different angle than just, like, learn the database. So is there a world where, like like, what is the pitch? Is it learn all the functions that MySQL offers?

Or is it, like, make things faster? You know what I mean?

Aaron

Yeah. That's a good question. The framing has always in my mind been, like, databases for for developers. That's always been the angle.

Adam

But why do the developers need to know more about databases?

Aaron

And yeah. So that diff the the differentiation the for developers is a differentiator, from DBAs. And so that's like you you're a developer. You don't want to be a DBA because that would suck, but you do need to know enough about the database. And, and truly it's like, honestly, it is.

Yeah. Probably make your app faster. Because a lot of the things that I end up teaching for developers is like how to drive the database and how to do these things and make it more efficient and that kind of stuff. So maybe the angle is better summarized as performance.

Adam

I thought some of my my instinct is you need to make sure you have they they can speak to why someone needs to know these things versus just, like, assuming that they know or that they're just looking for it for the sake of doing it. You know what I mean?

Aaron

Mhmm. And

Adam

I think there is some level of assumption you can make like like, even with, like, the test driven Laravel stuff as an example, I don't necessarily have to pitch people on why to do it. Like, there wasn't inherent, you know, demand for 1 to know how to

Ian

how to

Adam

do it. People had their own reasons. You know what I mean? So I don't think that's can't work. I'm just I think it's important to think about, you know, and I think like the other thing that we talked about this a little bit briefly, but I think it should it's important to think about as part of the strategy is, like, is someone who bought, like, Postgres for developers gonna be really excited for you to release MySQL for developers, then really excited for you to Yeah.

Yeah. And that you don't need to have those all be the same customer, I don't think. But I think it would be nice if it was. You know? So, like Sure

Aaron

would be.

Adam

In comparison, someone who, like, bought your Postgres course could be excited about your Redis course, you know, but probably wouldn't be excited about the MySQL course because those are kind of, like, the same thing in ter

Aaron

for that purpose. Excited about the Laravel Eloquent course or the Rails Active Record course. So there could be there could be courses where it's like, yeah, I wanna buy, you know, 2 or 3 of these. Let's say I'm Laravel and MySQL or Rails and Postgres. But I also want Redis or I just switched companies and I need to know what the deal with SQLite is because everybody's talking about it.

They don't know about it. Like that kind of thing. But, yeah, it wouldn't be like, oh, I can come here and buy every single course because, you know, fully 80, 75% of them don't apply to a single person.

Adam

So if anything, it might just influence a strategy of, like, what you work on when.

Aaron

You know what I mean? Mhmm.

Adam

Like, it might make more sense to do, like, a MySQL course, and a Redis course, and a DynamoDB course before doing, like, another just relational database

Aaron

course. Straight up for something. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

I mean, that makes that makes pretty good sense to me.

Ian

What this kinda made me think about, which I think is an excellent, point Adam and good good on you for bringing this up because I do think there are some issues there. I mean also when you're at the like the the highest level so to speak of like the different databases There is a fair amount of competition. Like there are these course, you know, you, you dummy or whatever all these places are. Well, I'm sure there's my SQL courses in there or whatever or whatever, like Right. So even LARIC test.

Right? Like there is, they're not the depth maybe Aaron's gonna do, but there's like stuff in there about like different things. You have AI now people are like, Hey, I'll just go ask chat gbt, how you do this thing. And like, so there's other forms of competition. One of the things that was making me think about I do agree, like, having some kind of hook is is interesting, and it's gonna be hard with these different databases, and that the cross sells maybe not as strong.

So one of the ideas that it gave me was, should the real product be the eloquent course? Because the eloquent applies to all the relational databases. Right? That's the thing you make sexy. That's the thing you sell.

The database platform courses are YouTube and free and they are your marketing. And so you're just trying to build up your audience with those and that's your marketing. And then inside every single one is the ad for the like eloquent and rails active record or whatever. Like now put these things to work with our course that explains to you how to actually use this in your actual code with the actual, you know, ORM that you actually use every day, and implement these ideas with the tool you actually use every day. And that's actually making you directly better as opposed to, like, The database stuff where I don't necessarily need all of it all the time and things like that So I don't know about that exactly but the idea of like it's kind of like even tailwind does right like tailwind has all this marketing material that is the docs.

That is the big marketing and that's out there for free and everybody uses it. And then the sexy thing is, yeah, now I know how to do this thing, but, wow, there's Tailwind UI that I can just go by and, like, the thing I thought I was gonna have to build myself with Tailwind. Now I can just copy paste it into my app. And, that's even better than me trying to become a designer or anything like that. So there's, there's something there where you're gonna have to be marketing.

And so how can you, there might be some opportunity to have some elements of this be free, and YouTube oriented potentially. I I

Aaron

have thoughts on that. Adam, do you have thoughts on that first?

Adam

My my thoughts to that specific suggestion is I'm not sure there's gonna be enough people who are searching YouTube for specific MySQL stuff that are also, like, part of the Laravel crowd. I think, like

Ian

Between Rails and Laravel, that's gotta be a good chunk.

Adam

I maybe. I just don't know who, like, like, I guess, like, something I was gonna say anyways that feels like part of that is, like, to me, it feels important to decide, like, what's like the identity of like my customer, you know, Who are my people? Yeah. You know?

Ian

Yeah.

Adam

And I worry that, like, developers is not specific enough. Okay. Like, the broader you go, the bigger the market, but the harder to, like, really make them believe that you are the lead guy.

Aaron

For them.

Adam

You know?

Aaron

Yeah. Yeah, by that.

Adam

So I guess, like, that's something to to think about for me. Like like, I don't think this is maybe your thing, but, like, when I was thinking about this before the call, I was trying to think, how would I sell database knowledge if I was gonna do, like, a course today? And, like, the thing that pops into my head immediately is, like, fullstacknextjsdot com. That is, like, the course that I would make because they have all these new, like, access to you they've added all these features that where you can run React on the server and all this sort

Ian

of stuff.

Adam

You know? And it's just, like, torrential force SQL in there and your SQLs. Yeah. Whatever and stuff, like, in this package of, like, I'm a front end developer. I've been building things, talking to APIs, but I wanna make things, like, work all the way.

Like, how do I actually do that? Like, that is, like, an exciting course title to me.

Ian

That is also you

Aaron

know what I hate most about that is that's a great idea. I hate that so much.

Ian

Well, I think that's also you have all these front end developers that just have less experience. Right? Like, these are people who have engaged both with all the data.

Adam

People never touched those spaces at all. They don't know if

Ian

anything is going to be crowd has done some databases up on some level.

Adam

And this is something that wasn't obvious to me for a long time, but, like, it has become more and more clear to me over time that there's, like, a huge amount of people building front end stuff. I always used to think that, like, when someone was using, like, you know, some like, a a lot of people using Mongo or a lot of people using, like, some easy, like, hosted database solution.

Aaron

Easy.

Adam

I had I told myself this story that they were doing it because, like, they'd done everything I was doing, and now they're, like, smarter and better than me, and that's why they're using Mongo or whatever. But, like, the reality is most of these people never written a SQL query in their life. Correct. And they're just doing, like, what the easiest thing to find was that seems like it would work. You know?

Right.

Ian

It'll hold some data on the server. Yeah.

Adam

And that doesn't mean that these people aren't smart or good at what they do, but they've kind of ventured into this whole world from, like, the the different side than we do.

Aaron

The different side. Yep.

Adam

Like, we started with PHP files where you're talking in the database and setting the cookies and session stuff and rendering HTML all right there. And then a bunch of people sort of come in 10 years later, and they get jobs as React developers or Vue developers or whatever, building up front ends, talking to 8 guys about people have worked on, and they have all sorts of expertise there, but they've never done the database stuff. And, frankly, probably intimidated by the database stuff and think it's a lot harder than it actually is and whatever. Right? So I I think, like, that's a really interesting opportunity, and I think you have enough of an audience to, like, get your foot in the door there.

Like, there's definitely the Aaron Francis brand has bled out of, like, the Laravel space, you know, in the last however long, for sure. But yeah. I I don't know. So that again, that was just, like, me just thinking, what would I do if I was trying to, like, sell a course on database stuff, and, like, that was the idea instantly for me. And I'm sure there's other things that are kind of like that, but I think you have to figure out, like, who are the people that need help with this or could get most excited about it, and how can I sell them something that helps them, like, achieve, like, the goal that they think they wanna achieve?

Aaron

You know? Mhmm.

Ian

So what do you think about this, Adam? Because to me, the the so that we haven't even talked about the consulting sort of end of the world here. Right. But like, if we're, you know, we're, we're in here poking holes a little bit. One hole I would say I would poke at a little bit is like

Aaron

the the I'm so jealous. You just opened a freaking yeast

Ian

crack cold Just on it.

Aaron

Scrub it in my face.

Ian

Guy. Ice cold. He didn't even he didn't even

Adam

You don't like Coke. Some sort of alcohol.

Aaron

Zevia here, like a zevia. I got cream soda zevia, like some kind of I

Ian

got water. Water in a yeti.

Aaron

I got water too.

Ian

This is

Adam

like an a g one drink. You know what I mean? Like the Tim Ferriss placebo water. Alright. But,

Ian

I just love that that sound, that good cropping. I mean, it

Aaron

just felt so fresh.

Ian

Do not like the micro living. I mean, it came through. It came through.

Aaron

Yeah. It came through. It came through. It's so crispy. I love it.

Wow.

Ian

Wow. Okay. We're we're less like I'm, like, lost my train of thought. Yeah. I know.

Yeah.

Aaron

So jealous. You're poking holes in the consulting side.

Adam

Now I wanna stay in

Ian

force. You

Adam

poke a hole. Poke a hole.

Ian

Well, I mean, well, because here's the thing. Like, I feel like the thing definitively you and Steve can absolutely do and have done and have evidence of your value in is design a course for YouTube that can greatly increase like your reach and your sales and all those things, right?

Aaron

Yes.

Ian

The courses. I mean, even the course you did, right, even the free one, like, it still had PlanetScale's involvement in the sense of, like, they are a big MySQL shop. They have their own brand that they're bringing something to. Right. So I guess to me, it's like, there is this idea of like, should, are the courses potentially, distraction from the better business, which is the Aaron Francis consulting, you know, the try hard consulting end of the thing where.

Aaron

Yeah. Yeah.

Ian

Yeah. And also even the things that might more naturally come off that, like the screencasting.com and other types of courses and services that tie in very tightly with the consulting end, Whereas the, the learn postgres end is kind of just like out there on its own.

Aaron

Different type of content. I see

Ian

what you're saying. It's just, it's not integrated with kind of the other side of the business so much. So I don't know. What is what do you think about that, Adam?

Adam

I don't know. I think it I think it'd be interesting to talk through, like, what is the, like, the strategy for the consulting side? Like, what what do we believe is, like, the strongest version of the consulting side? I agree.

Ian

I can

Adam

Like, the Screencast to no comp thing is a nice tie in with that because, like, you guys

Ian

Yep.

Adam

Are known for being able to produce, like, really great, well produced, high quality stuff. Right? And there's definitely like a subset of people who just wanna know how the hell did they do that? You know? Mhmm.

And screencasting.com is like already exists, which is awesome,

Ian

you know? Which is, man. And is Yeah.

Aaron

It turns

Adam

out. And, yeah, that can, like, can funnel in to that. But, yeah, I

Aaron

I can also give you

Ian

the vision

Aaron

Yeah. Yeah.

Ian

Tie more closely. I wanna say just one thing on screencast.com. It is on the sexy end of the world. To me, it's a little more clear. Like, I'm a person that wants to make videos for whatever reason.

Yep. This is how I do it. I'm very motivated to learn that. The database stuff is a little more abstract. Right?

Like, maybe I have a specific question or 2, but I'm probably just gonna go look those up. So then it's more about my, like, general knowledge. Like, I wanna improve myself generally, so I'm gonna learn, take this course. But it's, it maybe doesn't have the bite of, like, I'm trying to do this video. I have no idea what the hell I'm doing.

Screencast.com is, like, directly equal to a solution on how to do that thing. So

Adam

Yeah. I agree with that. It's a bit more of, like, I'm on a journey. Like, I've decided to climb Mount Everest here, and, like, this is gonna help me do it. Yeah.

Yeah.

Aaron

Yeah. That makes sense to me. So the vision for the consulting side is, so we're coming out of the gate with 2 different things that we offer. We could we have, I don't know, maybe 15 calls set up with people who emailed us and were like, we wanna work with you today. It's

Adam

like, awesome.

Aaron

That's a lot.

Ian

That's a lot.

Aaron

Yeah. It's it's awesome.

Ian

That's a lot of work right now.

Aaron

What are they doing? That is what we're gonna find out. And that's why we're pushing that's why we didn't put anything on the website that's, like, we do this for this price, because

Ian

we have

Aaron

no idea what Totally. We really want. We we have, but I wouldn't put any

Ian

price on the website ever for this What do you hope people want?

Aaron

Yeah. Here's here's what I hope people want, and here's what I think people want. The first is the, the first is like the straight down the middle, offering of you have a dev ed team. You have a in house team that you're paying $1,000,000 a year or more for all these salaries, and they're producing video, and it's not, like, it's not working. Your video strategy is just not working, and you're wasting a lot of time and money on it.

So the offering is you bring in Steve and I, and we work with you from beginning of, like, content ideas to framing to packaging. Then we don't do the recording. That's the big thing. We don't do the recording. There's a chance we could do the editing.

That's still an open question. But we are basically consultants to make sure that the video you produce is going to work primarily on, YouTube and Twitter. And so that's, like, the first offering is we will sit alongside of you. We'll have calls with you. We'll help you strategize.

We'll help you come up with packaging, that sort of thing that's, like, better than you put your webinar on YouTube and you wonder why it doesn't work.

Adam

Do you have any idea how many people that have contacted you already seem like they might fit that description?

Aaron

Several, at least more than half, I think, already have some sort of dev ed, dev marketing, DevRel sort of team. And so our pitch our pitch there is basically gonna be, listen, you have the talent in house. You just need someone to guide you. Because the last thing I want is for me to be on the hook, to be the face of every company. I think that's a a bad idea.

But I would you know, Steve and I would love to say, like, hey. This content could be 10 times better if you just changed it by, like, 3 degrees. So that's kind of the first thing. And then the contact us for pricing, the enterprise sale is you want Steve and I to produce the entire thing for you. And so that would be for somebody that's like, hey.

We want you to make a discrete course on the thing that we're doing, and we will pay you the gobspect gobsmacking amount of money to do that. And that's the second, like, basically, outsource the entire deal.

Adam

Gotcha. I'm surprised that there's that you've have such a strong signal for people who want, like, consulting on the dev side of stuff, and I'd I have no data. You know what I mean? I'm just that's got to be surprised, surprised. I would've thought, in my situation, the appeal is like, oh, we can pay these guys to, like, do stuff for us, and now I don't have to, like, take on the risk of building a team to do it.

You know, I would have thought that that would have been the majority. So I'm surprised to hear that, the opposite That is

Aaron

this, but I don't think it's the majority. I think the majority, and I I could end up being wrong about this, but just based on the email and the domains and the people we've talked to, I think the majority is pretty large companies that want help making it work.

Adam

Yeah. That's good, though. You know? It's great. That's that's true.

Ian

And I think

Aaron

we're we're maybe finding that there's gonna be some amount of people that want a kind of, like, a one off video like we did for ourselves. I think we're gonna find that there there's a there's a group of people that's like, hey. We're launching this new product, and we want a hype video, and then that's it. Like, we don't want education. We don't want ongoing stuff.

We don't want a course. We just want a well produced, like, trailer, basically.

Ian

Yeah. Like what, sandwich whatever used to do. Remember back

Aaron

in the day? Exactly.

Ian

They did that stuff. Mhmm. Yeah. I I mean,

Aaron

I don't charge an insane

Ian

amount of money. I was just gonna say, I just really reemphasize that you should not put any pricing on your website under any circumstances for any

Aaron

bring it to the brain before I do anything silly like that.

Ian

Yeah. Because, like, when some huge companies like, we have $3,000,000 in developer relations people out there at Prusenbilios. Right? Like, you should not be like, hey. The website says $9,999.

That's what we charge to, like, make your $3,000,000 team more effective. Like, that's in, like, nobody's even coming to you with that budget in mind. Like they're coming to you being like, okay. Like if we spend 10% of our budget to make this other 90% more valuable, like, that's great. So, like, you could definitely get 6 figure consulting gigs.

And so I do think you got to be careful not to like short sell that. And I'm not saying you're gonna come out the gate that way. Right. But like I do think there is different for each customer too. Like, I think it is.

Yeah. Some people want x. Some people want x plus y. You know, it's not gonna be as easy as, like, here's the seven things we do, and we that's it. Like, it's probably gonna be uglier, but that's you can pay for it.

Aaron

I'm so excited. I'm so excited that Steve loves that stuff. He loves to, like, the the hands on consulting business. Yeah. Business development.

Like he's like, I want to do all that great. Cause I super don't.

Adam

I do think like kind of toward your point earlier, Ian, that that does feel like a little bit what's the right word? It's not really, like, in conflict with, but I feel like it's gonna be, like, the the database course business and, like, the help people, like, create awesome content businesses. Like, they feel, like, in odds with each other a little bit to me.

Ian

A little bit. Time wise and things like that too. I mean, I think I guess my takeaway from it, Aaron, I think we've talked about this a little bit. It's more like, it's sort of like, can the courses kind of fund you until maybe the consulting side gets going, but then the counterargument, I almost say the opposite way.

Adam

Like you could do the consulting now. You could do

Ian

15 people on the hook, like

Aaron

too much consulting money to worry about courses?

Ian

Yeah. Potentially. Right? Like, if there's

Adam

so much demand for consulting buy yourself the space to work on the courses. You know what I mean?

Aaron

Like, maybe you can just do one big consulting contract a quarter. That's, like, a

Adam

contract a quarter that's, like, a 100 grand or whatever. You know? Right. And have all the rest of the time to to work on your own products and stuff.

Aaron

Yeah. And that might be, you know, we're gonna take all these calls and we'll see, like, what is the demand? What is, like, what does the market want and what is our how much time does that require and how much money does that give us? And we may do that calculus and be like, f the courses. I'm not doing that for a while.

Like, we gotta go pick up all this cash.

Ian

I mean, let's break while iron's hot, hot kind of element to some of this. Yeah.

Adam

What are you more excited about that's

Aaron

on the table.

Adam

Yourself? Like, do you get more excited about, like, putting together a curriculum for a database course and teaching it or more excited about, like, helping other people make really great lead, like, well produced content. You know? If you had to pick 1, which one, like, Jazz is more

Aaron

If I had to pick 1 so I'm torn because if I had to pick 1, I think, like, meeting with people and helping them do better and, like, just basically brainstorming and jamming sounds like a whole lot of fun.

Ian

Mhmm. And I

Aaron

think it would be very rewarding to see the numbers turn around. But then the other part of me is like, but I like the long term like, I like the long term bets of having in house courses that we can just kinda layer on top of each other as time goes. And that's,

Adam

like in house courses

Aaron

is kinda like our backstop.

Adam

On making content too. Right? Like screencasting.com.

Aaron

That's true. Yeah.

Adam

Great domain you already got there. You know?

Ian

Great domain. Yeah.

Adam

Like, we kinda talked about when me and you chatted the other day. Like, I asked you, if you didn't own screencasting.com and it just existed as a website somewhere, and I told you that they had a team of 20 people, would you just, like, be able to believe that and just be like, oh, yeah. I could I could see how that would be the case. Mhmm. You know?

And I I think we both agreed, yeah. That doesn't sound unreasonable for a company called screencasting.com to have a team of 20 people. You know?

Ian

Like, I don't

Adam

know what it takes to get there, but I can, like, imagine how that could exist. You know?

Aaron

And you're saying that's more congruent with the other offerings

Adam

and so, like so.

Aaron

Yeah. That I mean, that is our, like, basically our down market offering of you come to us and you don't wanna pay many x 1,000 of dollars a month. Well, you can go learn it over here.

Adam

Do you follow, Kevin Shen? I think his name is on Twitter. Uh-huh. I feel like that his business Studio

Aaron

lighting guy?

Adam

Yeah. Like, basically, the setup your background of your Mhmm. Studio setup in your office guy. I feel like that I feel like he's got a great business going just doing that. And that seems like just a part of what Yeah.

You guys hope to offer, really. You know? Yeah. Like, you can't make a good on camera video without solving that element. You know?

Yeah. And they, like, fly around and

Aaron

Yeah. They go out. Yeah.

Adam

It's awesome.

Ian

Yeah. Yeah. I imagine that becoming a whole, yeah, different aspect of the business is things like that. Like improving your, the execution of your team by improving those type of things. And

Aaron

Yeah. Totally.

Ian

Well, I guess I'm just hiring or whatever. There's a lot of op different areas there.

Adam

I I'm thinking, like, in my head, if you were gonna double down on, like, database courses and stuff, it's clear to me what, like, the YouTube strategy is. It's teaching developers stuff. You know what I mean? But if you're gonna go down this other avenue, I kind of feel like you'd still need to do some of that to, like, not get rusty because that's, like, the audience that you're trying to connect with. You know what I mean?

But just like you were already talking about with screencasting. Com, I could totally see how you could create a lot of great content on like, so many YouTubers already do this, but not for our audience on this is the lights you should buy, this is the camera you should buy, this, you know, like, you've already talked about doing that before,

Aaron

right? Like, you will entire stream of content there.

Adam

Yeah. And and just to be, like, the people who do that for technical developer space, even if, like, you have nothing that unique to offer there, you're still gonna win, you know, like a business that I've thought about starting in the past, and there's actually like at least one that exists. Is just like, like, strength training for developers, like that can be like a real business because like, you just have this ability to connect with them. You know? It's like, I know you're gonna limit yourself and you like whatever.

Right. You know? And, yeah. You know? Like, it it's it's in the idea of, like, thing that's not for developers, like, for developers, like, the MySQL thing is not really an example of what I mean

Aaron

by that, but it's more just like for

Adam

developers, painting for developers, painting for

Ian

developers, you

Adam

know, like,

Aaron

Yeah.

Adam

But, like, the the studio lighting stuff, there's content production stuff. If you can, like, keep that connection with that audience, I think like, you know, it's hard to know for sure. Like, there is a risk of like, how many people out there, like so for example, I've seen people try to build people have built courses in the past, try to make apps to, like, make it easier for other people to make courses and stuff like that.

Aaron

Yeah.

Adam

And you realize that, like, there's, like, 75 people making courses. You know? So that's, like, not a business, unfortunately. Yep.

Aaron

Yeah. There are more course platforms than there are courses at this point.

Adam

Yeah. But this feels like, I don't know. It feels like it could be bigger than that for the same reason that all these people have great businesses around helping people just say, set up their office backdrop, whatever. No,

Aaron

I'm sure

Adam

Kevin's pitch is not like your content creator, although there's a lot of people who are content creators doing it. I'm sure big part of his audience is like sales representatives who

Aaron

need to look

Adam

good on Zoom calls and stuff like that.

Aaron

I think you're right.

Adam

But there's something nice about like, okay, if you like the idea of helping people, like, create really well produced content and stuff like that, you own screencasting.com already that already has, like, a course there. That just feels like investing in, like, something that already, like, exists, whereas the courses, I know it's not like it doesn't exist, but it does feel like a bit of a, like, reset to me compared to, like, building on the other stuff.

Ian

I do think there's what do you think about this, Adam? I do feel like there is this inherent risk. I mean, I've definitely had it. I don't think even you've had it a little bit, Adam, and was it with like catalyst of like this idea of like a second product is super hard. And, like, so coming out the gate with 2 products that are not, that don't really coordinate well together totally is also gonna be extra challenging, I think, in in some ways because it's just hard to be split on your focuses.

Adam

Yeah. That's kinda what I mean. Right? Like, it's it's if you can just say, okay, we're gonna help people create really high quality content, and just, like, let's use that constraint and make sure anything we do fits in there. It's kind of clarifying, you know, but it also has to be viable, obviously.

Ian

You know

Aaron

what I mean?

Ian

Mhmm.

Adam

But it's it it does seem easier to test the viability of that than the viability of hit courses. You know what I mean?

Ian

Right. You have to kinda make the course to find out. Yeah.

Aaron

They kinda You do the whole thing.

Adam

Yeah. Yeah. Exactly. You have to do

Ian

the whole thing.

Adam

To do. And it and if it doesn't work, that sucks. I've never experienced it not working, but I know it can not work.

Aaron

Can imagine.

Adam

Yeah. I've I've seen other people who have had it not work, you know?

Ian

There will be interesting trade offs here. Right. Because there is like, I think it's unlikely for you to make an eloquent course or a my sequel course or something like that. And like, oh man, we sold $2,000 worth. Like, I think that's unlikely.

Like, I think you're going to sell some tens of 1,000 of dollars at the low end of that rate just because you have a reasonable sized audience now, people wanna buy these things from you, I think, on some there's some base market there for sure. So I don't think it's gonna be like Just We did it and we got nothing. Selling less

Aaron

than $100,000 of an eloquent course,

Ian

I think would be what you

Aaron

would be an abject sale there. Yeah.

Adam

Right. So You might not buy yourself that, like, 18 months of free space to do the next thing.

Ian

Right. You may not get to the half a million or 7.50 years. So what happens?

Aaron

And then it's like, great. I I don't have to be involved in the consulting as much. I can do another course and we can, I can just keep this train rolling? So yeah. But keep going in.

Ian

Yeah. So, I mean, I think that's where, like, I mean, that's also a a possibility there too. Right? You do the one course, you see how it does, and you're informed by that. Right.

And then you can decide from there too, but also you're gonna be informed. I mean, one nice thing is in the week or 2, you're gonna know like what the, so you have these 15, 20 calls. How many of them are serious? Right. How many of them are very serious and you're talking money?

Aaron

Yes.

Ian

How much is that money? And all those kind of things. And then that's gonna obviously inform you a lot too. If there's like already people who are like 6 figures or high, you know, 5 figures, like, well, that changes things maybe versus like

Aaron

Kids gotta be

Ian

Everybody everybody thought it was gonna be 5 grand, then, yeah, then that's Yeah. Exactly. Forms things the other way. Right?

Adam

So Yeah.

Ian

But part of that is how you define it too. There is the part of being a successful consultant is to make sure you ask for enough money, which is not always what people are inclined to do, especially from the developer background. It's like, well, there's only gonna take me 20 hours and 20 hours times. $200 is only this amount of money, but like really what you have to ask for is way more than that. Because like the value they're deriving is hopefully gonna be way more than that.

So, so I think in a month you'll have a lot more information too, which will be very useful on, yeah, you have 7 people who are like, let's do it. Son and deadline is very different from you end up with 1, and then, yeah, you're like, okay. We might have to do some other stuff here.

Aaron

Yeah. Yeah. That makes sense to me. I think the thing part of what I'm part of the hesitation I'm feeling for just like I know you're not saying this, but just like giving up the database stuff is I really I really enjoy it. And I think part of part of, part of our thought with how are we going to be successful is partially I'm going to continue to be out there.

And I think that's a big part of how we continue to get people to show up is I continue to do something. And so I don't think, like, I don't think I ever wanna disappear into I'm just a consultant because I think part of our top of funnel is basically gonna be good content that we produce.

Ian

So this but see, this gets back to my very original top point, which was, is the best way for you to make more money, that all these courses are free and people can just see, look at Aaron's YouTube channel. It keeps growing. Now he's at a 100,000. Now he's at 200,000. He understands developers.

This is the guy who understands developers. I feel like once you put it behind the paywall, that's, like, a whole different thing. Like, now you're not out there. Now it's like you're less out there. Now I assume you're gonna still do, like, some chunk is free and whatever.

Aaron

So hysterical on Twitter, but yeah. You know?

Ian

Right. That type of stuff. But it might be that, like, those courses are better served as marketing, and just growing your audience more and more and more at the maximum you can versus, you know, restricting that in any way, potentially.

Adam

See that making sense. Like, maybe not even just like it doesn't mean you can never do, like, a paid developer course, but maybe in these early stages, if it feels like these calls with these people who have reached out about working with them to help with their content. If that feels like after all that, you know what? Like, yes. There's, like, plenty of work here.

We can find some clients. Like, this is gonna be real. We're all gonna be able to pay the bills. That part's gonna work. Then I could see a world where it definitely makes sense to, like, focus on just making content that's free for quite a while until

Aaron

Mhmm.

Adam

While that helps feed the consulting side of things and build the audience around, like, the content quality stuff and all that stuff. And then you can do, like, a paid technical course, like, when there's the space to do it because, like, the consulting engagements are high priced, they bought you, like, a bunch of money and, you know, put a bunch of money in the bank and you've got, you sort of, like, have even more signal from the people who follow you about, like, what they wanna learn more about or what they're excited to pay for or whatever. Because I I do think, like, yeah, it definitely wouldn't hurt to have, like, to be able to sell something to the people who follow you just for your technical expertise, you know, and the Right. Because there's definitely a massive group of those people. But I do think, like, over time, you're becoming more and more known for, like, making, like, great produced content.

You know? Mhmm. Like, there's people who, like, were really pumped about the video you shared the other day because they just thought it

Aaron

was Mhmm.

Adam

Looked great, not because they necessarily were not invested in the message. You know what I mean? And I'm sure, like, the same thing is is true for when you you do, like, database content. There's probably a, like, a

Aaron

good chunk of people

Adam

who are just, like, wanting to learn how to pull that off or whatever, but I don't know. I I do think, like, you're yeah. It's it's hard to get the right balance because I agree with you, the concern of, like, how do you make sure there's, like, a reason to keep, like, building the audience around technical expertise too?

Aaron

Mhmm. You

Adam

know? Like, what's the thing that keeps that going? Because even if you wanna do this, like, you know, high quality video content for developers brand, you know, teaching you how to do high quality video content targeted at developers, For it to remain targeted at developers, developers still need to, like, feel a connection to you. Right?

Aaron

And some of the feedback I've consistently gotten that I've had to, like, internalize is that people just people really like me teaching. Like, they like the way that I teach. They like to watch me teach things, and so I feel like that is a like, that's an advantage that I don't wanna just let go of. You know?

Adam

Yeah. Can you think of any, like, if you were focused on the consulting side of things or focused on, like, the creating great quality content, helping people do that, what developer stuff could just, like, fall out of that, you know, so it doesn't feel like a distraction? I think that's the key is to find a way where it's like, you know, this is a bad example, but is there any reason that you had to write code to achieve, like, what you were doing to, like, help someone? It's like, I built this plugin for Final Cut Pro with React and Tailwind, and here's how I did it.

Aaron

Which Steve has done.

Adam

Yeah. Yeah. Exactly.

Aaron

Except for Premiere, but Yeah. Same idea. Yeah. I don't know. I feel like that is, I I don't know.

I feel like that leads me down the road of, like, how I integrated Notion with Trello, and it's like that you know? Because at that point, I feel like it's gonna be a lot of, you know, project management consulting type stuff, unless, like, hardcore either Laravel or database stuff in general.

Adam

What where do you think the ideas for content would come from for the database stuff, even if you were focused on that? Like, where are you dogfooding, like, your knowledge on that in a real way?

Aaron

Yeah. So the the easy ones are MySQL Postgres and SQLite because they're same flavors different flavors of the same thing.

Adam

Mhmm.

Aaron

And so I can take basically all of my knowledge up to this point and apply that to any of those, topics. And the details will be filled in by all these books that I bought that I'll read through to get all the specifics of each flavor. So those are easy. For something like DynamoDB, I wouldn't do it. I I wouldn't personally do it.

I would have, you know, maybe somebody else, maybe Alex Debris. Hi, Alex, If you're listening, have him come in and teach that course under, you know, under the database school brand, but he's the instructor on that one. I guess I guess my point is that

Adam

a common thing I've heard from many content creators in my life is, like, once they shift into like full time like content creation mode, eventually they sort of like lose touch with like all the things that gave them all the content ideas in the first place. So, like, I talked to, like, Chris Oliver in Amsterdam at Rails World, and he was, like, for him, it's, like, really important that he builds like, he's got like a SaaS app too, I think.

Ian

And to

Adam

him, it's like crucial that he continues to work on that because otherwise, all his, like, good ideas for Go Rails, like, dry up. You know? Yeah. Totally. And yeah.

So I guess I'm just just it's an ideal world as you can find some sort of, like, way to like, I know with Jeffrey, like, he's just, like, always, like, doing shit with lyric casts purely to, like, have new things to

Aaron

talk about. Yeah. Not because excitement can

Adam

necessarily be better, you know, and I'm sure it's

Ian

a really

Adam

good one. But, yeah. I mean, like, you can you build, like, the screencasting.com forum from scratch, you know, to stay sharp?

Ian

That is

Adam

You know? Like, stuff

Aaron

like that. Plan, actually. Yeah. Mhmm.

Ian

I do also think you're maybe discounting slightly how much the people, if you on the consulting end, will want the Aaron Francis experience. Like, you are the face, and I know you've kinda said a few times that, like, well, then Steve can handle that side and I'll be making courses. But I can imagine like, if it was me and I was hiring you guys, I feel like I'm hiring. Aaron Francis is who I'm hiring. And so if I don't get enough Aaron Francis, I might feel I might not might not be my favorite experience.

Adam

Yeah.

Ian

Even though Steve might be better than you at all this stuff. Right? Like it's Yeah. He's That's, like, that's the trade off of, like Right. You are the face.

Right?

Aaron

Right.

Ian

At least right now. And so that's which is sort of a whole other interesting side thing of, like, building up his notoriety and getting him more exposure, I think is, would be very valuable to you guys. But so I think you you might end up spending more time over there than you think because I think people are going to want to see Aaron Francis, and what does Aaron Francis think about what we're doing and so on and so forth.

Aaron

And, you know, it's across several clients for pulling in 6 figures a month. That's great. I would love to talk to you.

Ian

Yeah. I would love that.

Aaron

That sounds amazing.

Ian

Yeah. Yep.

Aaron

So what I'm hearing is concern about the congruency of the 2 different offers, and it's not even necessarily for the 2 different legs. It's not even necessarily that there are 2 different legs, just that the database content and the make good content content are just so different. And so I'm hearing instead of potentially doing database courses, double down on, yes, the consulting. But for the course side, double down on the screencasting stuff and kinda leave databases alone. Is that Maybe.

Adam

I don't know. I'm just talking. You know? I'm just, like, trying Yeah.

Aaron

Just keep talking. I just wanna make sure I'm I'm reflecting back what you're saying.

Adam

That is kind of

Ian

a journey. More about, like, how to utilize your knowledge. Like, is it best utilized as courses? Is it best utilized as free? Is it best utilized in some other way?

Like, it's almost like making sure you're optimizing that ability to me.

Adam

I can definitely see a world where the business makes sense as, like, Aaron makes, like, developer content, and that's, like, how you get lead gen for, like, the help other people make content business. Mhmm. And that is Steve's business. You know what I mean? For the most part.

Mhmm. And that's how, like, you make sure that there's actually enough focus available to, like, do well in, like, in both areas, You know?

Ian

Mhmm.

Adam

But it is, yeah. I I don't know. Just trying to come up with a master plan. You know?

Aaron

Yeah. I love a master plan. I need a master plan.

Ian

I definitely think, to me, the old the baseline is, like, keep the Aaron Francis train rolling. Right? Like Yes. YouTube subscribers increasing, all the reach increasing because as that increases, like, you just have a lot like, whatever you can churn out a course and make some money. Like the bigger your audience, the easier that stuff is to like do.

And so that's the foundational sort of element of what you can then build on top of, like, consulting or Right. Courses or an app someday that, you know, you start with a big advantage because you're building an app into an audience and you have a now a large audience and so on and so forth. So I think that is definitely kind of, to me, the one of the core things that has to keep happening

Aaron

for you,

Ian

which I'm sure is your plan.

Aaron

Mhmm. That is my plan. So here here was our, you know, here's our, like, our 2 month plan.

Adam

Yeah. That's what I was gonna say. Maybe you need to be thinking, like, phases here. Like, sequencing Yeah. Sequencing of the master plan.

Aaron

Yeah. Okay. So here's here's phase 1. We're gonna take all of these calls together, Steve and I both, and we're gonna, you know, try to figure out who wants what and for how much money, and figure out what is the viability on the consulting side of what we think is a good offering. So that's already like

Ian

well, I

Aaron

can't plan much beyond that. So that's on the consulting side, the plan. Steve's actually getting his wisdom teeth out today, so we're starting calls on Wednesday. So sorry, Steve. And then the other like, the easy start on the other side was I'm gonna do an eloquent course.

Like, that's just it seems like that's just a no brainer. I already have a huge amount of reach into the Laravel community, and that's like a nice combination of Laravel databases, touching content.

Ian

Do you

Adam

have an idea what what's, like, your spin on that? Like, what's, like, the what's the eloquent thing people are gonna learn that they have never learned before? You know?

Aaron

Yeah. I think so if Jonathan's was, you know, eloquent performance patterns, I that's one that's like super old now. But I I don't think that's gonna be my spin. I think it's gonna just basically be Eloquent Mastery because there's no I don't think there's a single comprehensive course over Eloquent at this point.

Adam

My instinct is that's not as strong as, like, a specific focus personally, but I don't know what other angles exist currently.

Ian

There's a lot of juice out there right now for SQLite. I wonder if it would be, like, eloquent for SQLite. Like, it's super focused on that, even though, obviously, like, a a lot. It's almost like a half a database course and a half element course. Like, we are kind of going into, like, the, obviously, the weird parts about SQL light, and then how you use that in a Laravel app and things like that because, obviously, there's trade offs there.

But, Yeah.

Aaron

I feel like that that's ripped it down. Yeah. That scoops it down.

Adam

It does. It might be

Ian

too it might be too tight.

Aaron

I think Taylor has said from 4 stats to, like, 90% of users are MySQL users. For sure.

Adam

Even something that's just, like, eloquent secrets, you know, is sexier to me than eloquent real estate. Cool. Like, what if, like, did you know it could do this? Did you know it could do this? Did you know

Ian

it could

Adam

do this? You know?

Aaron

That is kinda cool.

Adam

Yeah. But I don't know what other ones there are. But I I do think, like, it's gotta have a hook like that, not just, like, master it. You know?

Aaron

Mhmm.

Adam

At least to get that big bang launch, in my opinion. Like, I think and

Ian

Mhmm.

Adam

Of course, like, eloquent mastery maybe could be effective as, like, a slow growth over time evergreen Mhmm. Makes decent money for years type of thing. But even like test driven Laravel still makes 1,000 of dollars, you know, and it's like on Laravel 5.4, You know, it's like, that's how old it is.

Aaron

That's incredible. So

Adam

Laravel's secret eloquent secrets is definitely a bit short term, I think, focused.

Aaron

I I like I like, you know, the sexiness of that, but I also like the long term, like, eloquent mastery. Like, this is eloquent is so big at this point that you you frankly do need someone to teach you the whole thing.

Ian

Well, what about instead of being totally focused on the traditional big bang launch, what don't you use? Like, what Caleb does with live wire is a little bit more of a model where it's like, I'm doing this course. Like he does it about live wire. Right? And you've got the screen cast about live wire.

And he did do a launch. But his thing is like, he's just ongoing building videos. So it's like, you're, I think you can subscribe now. I don't know. I don't think it's one time purchase anymore.

Adam

Thank you.

Ian

Yeah. So it's like a subscription and it's like, I'm just gonna keep making videos. I mean, you're gonna be able to make videos about eloquent forever. Right? Like, I remember there's new stuff Do I want

Aaron

to make videos about eloquent forever?

Ian

Yeah. But I mean,

Aaron

it's good. Done. Like, I want it I want it to be a discreet work product. You know?

Ian

Yeah. Yeah.

Adam

That's true. Coming back to that eloquent mastery thing, and maybe it just needs a little bit of a tweak on it. My experience is that and I I'm not guaranteed to be right on this because I'm sure there's counterexamples. But I found, like, it's really easy to sell stuff that's marketed as advanced content. Like Mhmm.

Much easier than, like, comprehensive or from scratch or whatever. Okay.

Ian

And that feels right to me, I think.

Adam

That's what drew me to, like, destroy all software back in the day. It was like Uh-huh. This is like you're gonna learn, like, the hard stuff from a really smart person. That's the thing that's gonna help me level up, not like the beginner stuff. You know?

That does not to say, like, eloquent mastery can't be that, but I think it's

Aaron

Mhmm.

Adam

If I was gonna market it, there would be a lot of focus on, like, you already know how to do user dot all, but did you

Aaron

know then

Adam

that you can do user dot whatever the hell

Aaron

Something weird thing? Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Okay.

I like that. That makes sense to me.

Ian

Well, yeah, with these traditional course launches, I feel like there is a heavy focus on, the impulse buy. And so, like, how do you get people to like, I mean, I bought, like, every one of your guys' courses. I bought everybody's everything. I don't know if I've ever completed one of them, but I bought them all, partially of support, partially because, yeah, it's like a good hook and whatever, and I buy it, and it sounds like stuff I don't know. And, then see, there is that, like, that you have to cater to that impulsiveness

Aaron

where, like,

Ian

something that's more just like it's a longer term baseline knowledge isn't maybe as an impulse buy as like, oh, there's like, I'm gonna learn those couple things to hit this problem. And the advanced eloquent course probably has that because I hit this weird thing and whatever. And, like, those are the things that stick in your mind. Right? Not the, like, baseline knowledge, though.

So

Aaron

So even calling it advanced eloquent, do we like that better?

Ian

I like that better than

Adam

eloquent mastery. Yeah. Yeah. Okay.

Ian

I definitely like that better. Yeah. I also think it even might help focus you, like, skip all that baseline crap. Like Yeah.

Aaron

It would be awesome.

Ian

Build build the advanced Don't, if it's in the docs, basically, don't

Adam

put it in, you know,

Ian

like Yeah. That's a that's a nice little self rule like Like Or

Adam

if you know some things maybe

Ian

But if it's fully covered in the docs, like Yeah. Don't maybe it shouldn't be in the course.

Adam

Yeah. I

Aaron

don't know. Nobody reads the docs anyways.

Ian

That's true.

Aaron

Okay. That's interesting. But do okay. So provided I find the framing for it, does that seem like a good, you know, 2 month plan? We figure out what the crispy consulting offering is I

Adam

think full stack Next. Js spends more money than that personally still. But I do think it's

Aaron

a good course. Next JS.

Adam

I know. And and this is biased on my part because, like, I'm just I'm not as connected to the Laravel community as I used to be. So I don't know, like I'm not as in tune with the demand there. You know

Aaron

what I mean? And that

Adam

doesn't mean it's not there. It just means, like, you can't trust my opinion on it.

Aaron

Yeah. I think the fact that I I don't know, the fact that people are still watching Jonathan's course all these years later

Ian

Mhmm.

Aaron

I think there's still demand for

Ian

learning all day 2

Adam

based stuff. It was a great course name. You know? It was it was

Aaron

It was

Ian

a great

Aaron

course name.

Adam

Really well. I think I named the course, actually. I'll take credit for that on the IRR work with them for that. Yeah. Shoot.

Aaron

But it I should have bought it instead of Jeffrey. That should have been on Johnny on the spot there.

Adam

There you go.

Ian

Oh, did Jeffrey buy it?

Adam

Yeah. It's on Lyricast now.

Aaron

That's it Lyricast now.

Ian

It's on Lyricast. Oh, it's on.

Adam

Yeah. So I

Aaron

Sponsor the show. Go check out Lyricast.com.

Ian

Check out Lyricast. Yeah.

Adam

But, yeah, it's just like it's it's a it's got us a spin on it. Right? I don't know how many other spins there are for Eloquent other than advanced stuff or and and it could be, like, Eloquent recipes. You know what I mean? Here's, like, a problem and, like, how to do it where you can push more work to the database instead of doing it in PHP or whatever.

Like, that's a lot of that sort of thing is what Jonathan's course hovers too. But that's really, like, where, like, the advanced usage, I think, comes from is is a performance sort

Aaron

of Right.

Ian

I was gonna say, should it even be bundled with Redis? Should it be, like, eloquent with Redis or something like, because like a lot of us, like, how do we do cashing effectively? I mean, we talked about it on the show before. Like, there's a lot, like when you really have an app that's going serious volume, like you need to cash it. Like you can't just throw everything at the database.

Better, honestly.

Adam

Like It's not about Eloquent. It's not about APIs and syntax and features of this one module in Laravel. It's like a holistic approach to getting data from your servers in people's faces, like, as fast as possible and maintainable as possible and just, like

Ian

Right.

Adam

Clean. You know? Like, maybe there's

Ian

Like, anywhere the performance end of it takes you, whether it's, like, presumably heavy caching wise, but maybe there's other services or whatever, other things that we covered that tie in there too. Cloudburst and page capture, whatever it like, all kinds of stuff.

Adam

This is, like, stuff I'm remembering from, like, the Braille's content days back in the day. But, you know, people always want to learn about, like, single table inheritance and, like Yeah. Mhmm. Like, what's that thing that they do in, like, base camp that DHH wrote about? Something about, like, polymorphic something.

I don't know. Like, stuff like that where it's like

Ian

Or even denormalization, like, when to denormalize and things like that. This is

Aaron

sounding this is sounding like designing data intensive applications in Laravel. Like, that's that's what it sounded like.

Ian

Something like that. I kinda like that. Something along those lines. Because that's the stuff you can't get from the docs, like back to that idea. It's the stuff that there's even really good information about.

It's the kind of stuff when you ask Chachi bt about these things, you don't get good answers. Most of the time.

Aaron

Even know what you don't even know what to ask. Yeah.

Ian

Yeah. Or you don't even know what to ask. But even when you do, like, it's a little dot, like, always great, especially Laravel specific versions of how to implement it.

Adam

So easy to tell stories that people are gonna read. You talk about on the marketing page and be like, oh, this guy is literally talking about me. It's like, you know that app on your site that takes 7 seconds to load no matter what? You know? Like, everyone has that page.

You know? Yeah. What if we could get that to be, like, under a 150 milliseconds? You know?

Aaron

Yeah. Yeah.

Ian

I mean, even that, I I've been thinking about that a lot lately, because that's, you know, kinda like, I think it's like Google's baseline standard of like a 100 150 millisecond load time. Like, could that even be like build the 150 millisecond app with, you know, build a 150, 100 millisecond apps in Laravel or Yeah. Something like that. Like And

Adam

and maybe it's like you

Ian

don't know about that rule.

Adam

This is maybe too limiting, but you could even add the constraint of, like, you know, no caching. You know? That's exciting. Mhmm. How do I do the 150

Ian

mils like that with

Adam

no caching?

Ian

Right. I

Adam

wanna learn that. You know?

Ian

I don't know if you should do that, but yeah. Yeah.

Adam

High performance Laravel. You know?

Aaron

I mean, that's a pretty good name.

Adam

That's what I do. That was

Ian

my favorite My Sequel book. High perform high

Aaron

performance my favorite. I know.

Ian

Sequel.

Aaron

Yeah. I'm biased because High Performance My Sequel is such a good book.

Adam

There and that's a good formula. The best is to take, like, something good and

Ian

Yes.

Adam

Niche it down. You know? Worded. Like, even, like, test driven Laravel. That's like I liked thought bot's test driven rails course.

You know? Mhmm. That's where that name came from.

Ian

There you go. Where'd that name come from? Yeah. And then the ad view

Adam

one I did

Ian

it Everything's remix.

Adam

Like advanced view component patterns or something. It's just like everyone loves the word patterns. Patterns is, like, the graph word. Course

Aaron

by the way.

Ian

Right? Yeah. Everybody loves the pattern. Yeah.

Aaron

Yeah. That's much, much broad. High performance Laravel is a great name. It's much broader. Mhmm.

And so I'd have to I'd have to rope in a few other components or things in there.

Adam

Just get it signed.

Ian

I have the logic that are logical. You know?

Adam

Here's, like, some reasons to use SQLite. Like, here's something that we do. Like, we in Tailwind UI, we use MySQL and SQLite. So we use Interesting. MySQL as, like, the real database for the users and accounts and licenses and all that shit.

But we have SQL like databases that we commit to version control just because we have a lot of data to query that's very static and needs to be the same in every single environment. Mhmm. And it's just way faster to query it from SQLite with its own connection than it, like, the original Right. The first, like, Tailwind UI, like, day 1 was, like, a bunch of, like, handwritten code to, like, crawl through, like, files on the file system. You know what

Aaron

I mean? Because we have

Adam

to file system based data store for, like, each component was a file type of thing. And then we wrote a script that ingests it all into, like, a SQLite database and query it all from there, and it goes right into version control. So that's, like, that can be, like, a couple lessons, you know, like Yeah. SQLite in Git, you know, like, cool reasons to do that or or benefits or whatever. It does got So much more

Aaron

of, like This is how I build build my website, Ian, and you make fun of me for it. This is what tailwind pros are doing.

Ian

I think I like I like this use case better than your personal website. But Ridiculous. Well, yeah, I think this gets at 2, like actual problems people have, right? Where it's like your problem in your real applications is very rarely, like literally eloquent, like, just eloquent and not touching anything else. Right?

Like, at the very least, it's always touching the database.

Adam

You don't want someone have to, like, use it right.

Ian

Be these other things.

Adam

Build their own bridge from, like, their problem to, like, your solution.

Ian

You need to, like, cross the bridge. The solution is, like ticket

Adam

is to cross the bridge. They you know what I mean? That's that's what, like,

Ian

the solution to this kind of problem is you need Redis and you need Eloquent and you need MySQL working in conjunction Yeah. Smartly to solve x, y, z. You can even teach people that's hard.

Adam

Varnish. You know what I mean? Or

Ian

Varnish. Yeah. There we go. Yeah. But that's how the one I was getting out with, well, that's why I was getting out with CloudFlare.

A more modern straightforward take might be like, maybe there's some CloudFlare components in there. Right. Yeah. Or like elements or whatever. And like, you know, like I think, even if you did have to, I mean, you know, everybody, so like you can be Mo like, I mean, Adam just gave you a very interesting idea, right.

Of like committing sequel light in terms of how he actually used it in production. Like you could imagine, like, what does forge do behind the scenes? What is, what does Lara cast do behind the scenes? Like, whatever, like maybe, you know, what's great

Adam

YouTube content, great YouTube content, Interviewing people that run these types

Ian

of apps. About their problems.

Adam

On the screen and, like, you know? Yeah. At Laircon, you should their issues. Work with your with producer Steve, set up a room somewhere, come in a few days before the conference, record, like, 3 to 4 videos with different people who are coming to the conference and drip the bone on the YouTube channel. Here's, like, a video I did with Taylor Hardware where it shows you how, you know, this thing works or whatever.

Yeah.

Aaron

Like, that is worth the price of admission right there. I gotta do I gotta

Ian

There we go.

Aaron

Text Steve right now and tell him to buy a Lyricon

Adam

ticket. Great example

Ian

of the type of

Adam

content that you you need to, like, know how to plug a light into the wall to create. You know what I mean? Like Right. Yeah. I already got some houses.

A bit.

Aaron

Uh-huh. Yeah. That's incredibly obvious. Okay. That's a great idea.

Adam

High performance Laredo. That is way better than any title or concept we've discussed.

Ian

Send my money? Yes.

Adam

What what percent take my money type of Yeah. Okay. Topic.

Ian

Here's That's the name I've been most excited about internally here. I'm like, I wanna buy this.

Adam

Leave this

Aaron

conversation, sir. Please comment. Please comment or

Ian

tweet us. Below.

Aaron

Yeah. Please tell us. I'm sorry. Yeah.

Adam

Types of businesses to have really good ideas. You know? I think is my personal opinion. Like like, I was kinda talking about before, but, like, how I don't I've never launched something that really failed in terms of, like, courses and books and stuff like

Ian

that.

Adam

You could do every single thing that I did and fail. The idea just doesn't have the hook that it needs to have for it to, like, work. You know? So that's a good idea, though, I think. High performance layer book.

That is a good idea. That it plays on, like, your favorite database book of all time. You know? That's just, like Yeah.

Ian

The Omar story that is just,

Adam

strong. You know? So that's exciting.

Aaron

Mhmm.

Ian

Well, it's all it's right that the idea is people wanna separate the marketing from the content or the idea, but the reality is you can't, they are inseparable. And so like you have to, the idea has to inherently have some element of a hook to it in order to be successful. Like they are the same thing. Yeah. The good hook with no foundational part Mhmm.

Sometimes works, but most of the time still doesn't. And then the good idea with no hook often doesn't work. So, yeah, you have to marry them. So I think we've definitely I I like where we're going with this. I think, that's Yeah.

Aaron

I like that. It's it's, it's embiggening my vision because I was thinking it was just strictly eloquent, but I do think that that angle's

Ian

better. And it's also a thing that becomes an asset that I feel like will be more cross sellable. Like, as you go out and build the YouTube following in these other areas, like it talks to the whole Laravel audience. So even if you are like, you do eventually build like a post course. So let's just say it's free on YouTube.

Like there's some percentage of that population that's Laravel developers will these days be a reasonable part of that, and you have a thing that you can still sell them, that's directly for them and their needs. And so that's kinda interesting too versus, like, being maybe ultra niche down and things like that or more niche down.

Aaron

Yeah. And listen, if I ever do a free Postgres course that is free on YouTube, I'm getting some I'm getting some Postgres hosts to to pay me to put their name

Ian

on it. I'm not I'm not just

Aaron

I'm not just doing it for free.

Ian

Well, that yeah. We didn't even talk about that. I mean, that was kind of my other thought with that was that like, if, as the audience grows and you do things, if you do YouTube oriented, I mean, how does every YouTuber make money like sponsorships, like in what is Casey Neistat charge Nord VPN? It's not $10,000 a video. Right?

No. So, that's a whole other revenue stream of like, if you keep the grow, if you're good at getting the growth there

Aaron

Yeah.

Ian

That's probably what the best way to monetize it is through advertising and sponsorship and things. So yeah, a lot of options.

Aaron

Yeah. But if I'm doing a full course, I'm getting some company to pay me 6 figures upfront

Ian

Right. For the

Aaron

full course, and then I'll put it on

Ian

you as long as you still own it. Yeah. As long as you still own it.

Aaron

Yeah. Yeah. For sure.

Ian

Yeah. Yeah. I don't know. Other other things we need to touch here, I feel like we've covered a lot of ground here.

Adam

This is great.

Ian

This is good. There's nothing better than diving into somebody else's business. It's just a risk. Man, it's awesome. Just getting to, like, fire from the hip the whole time.

Aaron

Yeah. Yeah. And you don't have to

Ian

do any of the work. Yeah. Mine's mine's job.

Aaron

Got a lot harder.

Ian

If if our ideas suck, it doesn't matter. Like, we're not on the hook for any of this. Like

Aaron

It's just me and my family that suffers, not you.

Ian

Yeah. It's just yeah. It's just Aaron who's gonna have to go get a job again. Not not me. Fine.

Yeah. Oh, man.

Adam

You can always fall back on full stack Next. Js. You know? That that one's always good

Aaron

to know. I hate it that that's so that that's so good. I'm just I don't I'm not the person to do it.

Adam

That's the challenge. Yeah. But you could become the person to do it.

Aaron

I could I could just become the person.

Ian

You find the person and you mark you co market. Try hard co markets and like does kind of bug chunk of the marketing and the things and you split it 70, 30 or whatever, and it's a little revenue stream and if it blows up that's great. And if it doesn't, you did some marketing and stuff then to the world. Like, there's some other things there. But I mean, again, we're kinda getting back to like, you can only do so many things at once.

There are only 2 people. Blah. I

Aaron

will say now that I don't have a 9 to 5, it feels like I can do anything. You got it. I can conquer I can conquer the entire world.

Adam

9 to 5 and no kids. You would I I I can't imagine. Be literally on route to Mars right now in the rocket that you would have yourself. You know?

Aaron

Yeah. I would

Ian

be like

Aaron

that guy in limitless. What's his name? Bradley Cooper. I would I would be limitless. I would have I could I could change the physical world just by thinking about it with that much time.

Ian

This is hitting me so close to home right now because, like, we have this sale. I'm trying to, like, rework HubSpot and all this stuff. And I've given all the employees. I'm like, this is gonna be like a year's long project. And they were like, oh, we can do it faster.

I'm like, no, we can't because, like, I have 3 kids and the bigger they get, it gets worse. Like this, all of this month of April is like our our oldest kid visiting colleges. He's gotta choose by

Aaron

the end of the month.

Ian

Like, it's just totally dominating everything in our family. Our youngest is sick. Like, the whole you know, it's just like everything. It's like, you got no time. It only gets worse as they get older.

Aaron

Tell me that. Tell tell me No.

Ian

It's better. It only gets worse as it gets older. There's more time. Now you're the coach of their team or you're taking the practice 6 nights a week or whatever. Like, that's just important stuff to do.

So, yeah, like the young, no kids is obviously ideal, but young kids is actually, I always thought it was bad. And I was like, man, these young kids is tough, but it's actually way worse. I think it's bad.

Adam

I don't care

Ian

what he's like. Way worse.

Adam

You know how hard it is for me to get my 2 year old to go pee and brush her teeth before we take her to preschool?

Ian

That whole world, that part is hard too.

Aaron

Yep.

Adam

It's it grinds my soul down into dust Yep. Every single day.

Ian

Man, we had my daughter when we she was, like, learning getting potty trained. We would go on vacation for 2 weeks. We go on vacation she decides she doesn't like how it feels to go poopy. She's not going poopy and That was how our whole vacation was spent was begging this

Adam

like 2

Ian

or 3 year old, please, please go to the be my stomach hurts. Yes. We know your stomach hurts because you're refusing to go to the bathroom. That's why your stomach hurts.

Adam

Gosh. Dude, the worst part at

Ian

that point now scenario.

Adam

2 year old was potty trained, doing awesome. Now she decides she only wants to pee. She doesn't wanna poop.

Ian

Right. Yeah. There you go. It's the exact thing.

Adam

Just runs around, squinching her butt, with her hand on her butt. Yep. You know, just it's

Ian

I've lived it, man. I know exactly what you're going through.

Adam

Squinching her

Ian

butt. Squinching

Adam

her butt.

Aaron

Crazy. That's great.

Adam

That's so funny.

Ian

There might be a episode title there. I don't know. I'm not sure. No. Squinch in your

Aaron

butt can't be an episode title. That's bad.

Ian

I guess that's maybe a little King

Aaron

king of the hooks over here, and you wanna go with squinching her butt.

Ian

I don't think that's gonna get people oh, shit. We gotta listen to that.

Aaron

No. We got Waffen. If we did squinching her butt with Adam Waffen, yeah, maybe.

Ian

That's what I'm saying. Squinching her butt with Adam Wathan. That's the hook.

Aaron

Terrible. We can't put that out there.

Ian

Alright, man. Well, I think I think we've covered a lot here. Adam, thank you so much for coming on. This is a great idea. I think it was awesome, awesome advice, as always.

So everybody out there, follow us mostlytechnical.com, mostly technical pod on Twitter, or email us at mostly technical podcast at Gmail. If we ever stop having guests, we'll get to some of that. Next week, we have another guest, so it's not gonna be soon, but we will get there eventually. Obviously, check out Tailwind UI. If there's anybody out there that doesn't own that, playercast.com.

Try hard studios. Is it try hard studios dot com? I got the try hard studios.com. Mhmm. So check that out.

And, thanks everybody. We'll be off back, next week. Thanks, Adam.

Adam

Hey. Thanks for having me.